I count on my trusty readers to alert me to stories that I would never have seen. Today’s example is about something I’d not even heard of: pregnant women Photoshopping their baby’s sonogram on their stomachs.
From the accounts I read this actually began on the social network Flickr in 2009 and supposedly has engendered “debate.” The debate initially (or so I read) was over whether this is disgusting or beautiful, but has quickly morphed into another reason for pro-abortionists to go crazy over the impact of “humanizing” the unborn.
The online magazine Slate has a column titled “The XX Factor: What Women Really Think.” Allison Benedikt pondered the meaning of it all in “Photoshopping a Fetus Onto Your Pregnant Stomach Isn’t Just Tacky, It’s Bad for Women.”
How so? Well, it’s all cumulative, Benedikt writes unhappily. This “treat[ing] fetuses like people—including them in our family photo shoots, tagging them on our Facebook walls, giving them their own Twitter accounts.”
The more there is of that “the harder it will be to deny that they are people,” the more difficult it will be to resist “legislators and activists arguing that ‘the unborn child’ inside a pregnant woman’s womb should have the same rights as the living among us.” Woe is me.
Pro-abortionists are not known for understatement (they ARE known for seeing conspiracies everywhere) so it is not surprising that Benedikt grows progressively more unglued as her essay proceeds. From a grudging live-and-let-live (so to speak) perspective in the beginning, by the end abortion advocates who are female are warned that to Photoshop sonograms on their pregnant stomachs is the equivalent of giving aid and comfort to the enemy (that would be us).
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“[C]asually and publicly assigning human attributes to not-yet-human embryos,” Benedikt concludes, is both (politically) dangerous and “tacky.”
My sense is that the community of Slate readers is not exactly a hotbed of pro-life activism; among the authors they are as rare as hen’s teeth. But the readers—at least the subset I had time to read—essentially told Benedikt to “get a life”—aka “let’s keep a grip on reality, please.”
My favorite response neatly captured the insanity of trying to extinguish recognition—any recognition—that the unborn is one of us for fear that the “wrong” people (that would be us again) might use it.
“This might have been said a thousand times already but, what? Assigning human attributes to a fetus is hurtful to women?
“So is naming the fetus hurtful? How about buying it regular human-baby clothes, preparing a human-baby bed, and painting the nursery (my goodness, that implies that IT’S A BABY! Horrors!)? Should we rename ‘baby showers,’ ‘lump o’ cells showers’ instead? What about talking to it at night, having dad pat the belly-bump, and weeping tears of joy over the impending arrival?”
Lighten up, Ms. Benedikt, this is truly an unnecessary meltdown. Besides, there is nothing you can do.
Every day in many, many ways we know more and more about our “impending kid[s].” And if you REALLY believe in “choice,” that ought to be cause for celebration.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
